Mexico Needs to Keep Its Gun Control to Itself

Nov 26, 2018

By: José Niño

Why does Mexico want to dictate gun policy in the United States?

The United Nation’s Third Review Conference on the Programme of Action, held earlier this year, tackled the topic of the illegal arms trade. Mexico offered several policy suggestions, the most notable being the tracking of “end users”—individuals who purchase firearms.

Mexico’s proposal goes well beyond the scope the of the Programme of Action’s original goal—curbing the illegal arms trade—and intends to regulate firearms within national borders and effectively spy on end users, and, above all, American gun owners. As if this weren’t scary enough, Mexico wants to use RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips to track gun owners.

Sky-High Crime Rates
Mexico does not have a leg to stand on in any discussion regarding gun control. The country’s sky-high crime rates have captured headlines in the past decade. A Time Magazine article from earlier this year documents how 2017 was the most violent year on record in Mexico.

According to the Mexican Interior Ministry, there were 29,168 murders in 2017. That’s a rate of roughly 20.5 murders per 100,000 residents in Mexico. What’s worse is that this per-100,000 figure may actually be underestimating Mexico’s real murder rate, since crime statistics in Mexico are based on the number of police investigations, as opposed to individual deaths.

Nightmare Gun Control
Mexico is notorious for its institutional corruption, but international observers often ignore another major factor contributing to Mexico’s rampant crime problem—gun control. As a matter of fact, Mexico’s gun control is so stringent, there exists only one official gun store in the country, located in the capital of Mexico City. For a country with widespread crime and drug cartels operating with impunity, gun control is a nightmare policy to have on the books.

Citizens have essentially no way of defending themselves against the clear and present dangers they face from criminals. But since it’s fashionable to take swipes at the United States these days, Mexico can just cast the blame up North for its home-brewed problems.

Learning from Our Neighbors
The United States does not need Mexico’s failed gun control policies. In stark contrast to its southern neighbor, the U.S. is a beacon of hope for gun rights. Over the past 30 years, the United States has seen unprecedented levels of gun liberalization at the state level. From Concealed Carry to permit-less Constitutional Carry, millions of Americans have a wide array of options at their disposal to defend themselves against criminals.

Gun liberalization has practical results that have made most of the country safer. Much to the chagrin of rabid anti-gunners, crime rates have fallen in tandem with increased gun ownership and looser gun laws.

A study from the Pew Research Center in 2015 illustrated how the murder rate halved from 7 per 100,000 people in 1993 to 3.4 per 100,000 people in 2014. During the same period, total gun deaths (which include accidental deaths and suicides) fell by about one-third, going from 15.2 to 10.6 per 100,000. On top of that, gun ownership has increased considerably, with estimates of more than 60 million guns imported, manufactured, and sold between 2008 and 2013.

Alas, globalist bureaucrats would love to derail all this progress. And to add a cruel sense of irony to this story, Mexico, the country the UN is counting on to spearhead this anti-gun initiative, is one of the poster children for gun control’s failure.

In international political circles, globalism is all the rage. Every supposed problem, be it the U.S.’s “excessive” gun rights or income inequality, must require intervention from some heavy-handed bureaucracy.

Rejecting Mexico’s gun control proposal is a rejection of gun control and globalism.

Now is the time to start building a wall against gun control.

José Niño is a Venezuelan-American political activist writing from Fort Collins, Colorado. Contact him at jnino584@gmail.com.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Gunpowder Magazine.